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The US Army and other military services began development of software-defined radios to replace aging analog systems in 1997—long before Wi-Fi, broadband cellular, and high-definition television were even on the drawing board. The Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) program was supposed to revolutionize battlefield communications, turning soldiers and vehicles into nodes in an all-digital network that allowed data and video to flow as easily as voice traffic.

Little did the people working on the JTRS program know that the product of their labors would take 20 years to start being deployed in volume to troops—and how little of the original scope of the program would ever make it into service. The Army just announced this month its roadmap for rolling out JTRS-based Handheld, Man-Pack, and Small Form Factor (HMS) program radio systems in volume—three years from now. That means it may be 2018 before most soldiers see the radios in the field.

On May 2, at Fort Bliss, Texas, the Army's HMS program team conducted its first "terrain walk-around" test of the AN/PRC-155 Manpack Radio, General Dynamics' backpack offering for the program. The tests were in advance of a Network Integration Evaluation test at White Sands—the same evaluation exercise where, in 2011, the Ground Mobile Radio program met its Waterloo. The Army cancelled the GMR program after those tests and after an investment of $6 billion.

JTRS radio systems are based on the Software Communications Architecture, a Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) based framework. The original intent of the JTRS was to make it possible for the military to reconfigure radios on the fly for various missions. And over time, the JTRS program sought to make it easier for hardware manufacturers outside of the group that won the initial JTRS contracts to make “JTRS-compliant” radios by essentially following a model similar to open source. Contractors could theoretically check out code from a government-owned library as long as they contributed back their implementations. By supporting new software modules such as "talk groups," the JTRS HMS radios were also supposed to reduce the number of radios leaders needed to coordinate troops in the field.

Enlarge/ A comic strip from General Dynamics extolling the virtues of "talk groups" on the Rifleman Radio.

The Army has bought a lot of radios over the last two decades thanks to the prolonged wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Some of those radios have been “JTRS compliant”—radios that use the software-defined “waveforms” specified by the program for digital communications. But it’s been over 10 years since the Army ran the competition between vendors for its parts of the JTRS program, and there’s only been a trickle of purchases.

The Army has bought approximately 5,600 Manpack radios (the larger, multi-channel back-pack sized radios used for long-distance and satellite communications by infantry units) and 19,000 “Rifleman” radios (single and two-channel handheld radios used for communications between individual soldiers in the field) designed for the HMS program over the past four years under a “low-rate” $250 million contract. But that’s less than 10 percent of what the Army envisions purchasing under the full program. It's a drop in the bucket for the Army’s communication needs.

Many of the radios the service purchased in the meantime have been proprietary digital upgrades of the radio systems they’ve had in the field since the Vietnam War, and the Rifleman radios purchased so far are a fraction of what’s needed for small-unit communications. That means, as Lexington Institute CEO Dr. Loren Thompson wrote in an article published in Forbes on May 7, “if the Army has to deploy in Korea or Ukraine before the end of the decade, some troops in the line of fire will still be using the hand signals you saw in Black Hawk Down to communicate.”

Part of the reason the Army has been dragging its feet on buying JTRS HMS radios in bulk is the complexity of configuring and deploying them, especially since the systems that were supposed to be the backbone of the Army’s communications network they connect to were never built. During operations with the new radios, the Army discovered that it took weeks to prepare communications plans for a brigade network because of the complex setup and interfaces on multichannel radios.

Meanwhile, software-defined radio technology has rocketed past the standards the military developed for the JTRS. While the JTRS slogged ahead and the GMR program got cancelled after failing field tests, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency kept trying to push the field forward with programs like MAINGATE, the Mobile Ad-hoc Interoperability Network Gateway program. The Army also bought mobile cellular communications systems—cell networks in a box, essentially, designed for data communications in the field—for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the Department of Defense has tested a variety of mesh networking technologies aimed at solving communications problems in the field with cheaper, more smartphone-like devices for soldiers.

Those programs, however, are probably years away from becoming anything substantial. And the HMS program is seen by many defense contractors as the last chance to get a big buyout of the Army before the DOD's budget starts dramatically shrinking. And the prime contractors on HMS have added a number of features to HMS radios in an effort to stay at least relatively fresh technologically, including the ability to act as miniature cellular phone network hubs.

The continued slow trickle of radio purchases for the next three years means that most Army units will still be waiting for any technology refresh. For the next few years at least, squad leaders will need to keep practicing those hand signals.

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Sean Gallagher
Sean is Ars Technica's IT and National Security Editor. A former Navy officer, systems administrator, and network systems integrator with 20 years of IT journalism experience, he lives and works in Baltimore, Maryland. Emailsean.gallagher@arstechnica.com//Twitter@thepacketrat